Sky signs Nintendo Wii as Gladiators sponsor

Nintendo gaming brand Wii signed a deal with BSkyB to sponsor the new series of 'Gladiators', which returned to UK TV screens after an eight-year absence on Sunday 11th May.

Nintendo Wii has signed up as the exclusive broadcast sponsor for 'Gladiators', giving it exposure during the 15 one-hour-long primetime shows.

Nintendo also have opportunities for brand communication during spin-off programmes 'The A to Z of Gladiators' and 'Gladiators Ready! The Gladiators Story'. It also sponsors Sky's on-demand content of the show.

Nintendo activity includes opening and closing idents, as well as bumper ads at either end of commercial breaks. The brand appears in promotional trailers for 'Gladiators', which are currently airing on Sky's channel network, and online at the 'Gladiators' microsite.

The show is presented by Ian Wright and Kirsty Gallacher, who are joined by original presenter John Anderson. It sees 32 competitors take on a series of challenges, including The Joust, The Wall, Hang Tough and The Eliminator.

Earlier this month Sky unveiled the 12 Gladiators who appear in the show, labelling them as "bigger, badder and better than ever before". They include Battleaxe, Destroyer, Panther, Oblivion and Spartan.

The first show attracted an impressive average audience of 1.5m, just proving the strength of the current trend for everything ‘retro’.

Grand Theft Auto – the film?

Uwe Boll, the German director who makes bad films from good computer games (examples include Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead & BloodRayne), recently confessed in typically modest style that he’s the perfect man to helm Grand Theft Auto: The Movie and he would make a “very brutal” adaptation.
“Grand Theft Auto would be super interesting for me, and I think I would actually be the right guy to do it, because my movies are all bloody and violent and I don't have a problem with action scenes,” said the director.

Unsurprisingly, Rockstar Games has chosen not to comment on the offer.

This is becoming more popular as we saw with the film release last year of Hitman and this year will see Mark Wahlberg take the lead role in the movie version of Max Payne.

Out with ‘Project Kangaroo’, in with ‘SeeSaw’

Project Kangaroo, the video-on-demand service from ITV, BBC Worldwide and Channel 4, is expected to launch under the name SeeSaw.

SeeSaw has been described as "wanting to do for broadband what Freeview did for digital TV", which will see BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 have an equal share of the joint venture and will offer more than 10,000 hours of TV programming. The service will initially be available via the web, with shows available either streamed or to download. However, the ultimate aim is to deliver SeeSaw content direct to televisions. BBC iPlayer has recently launched on Virgin Media’s cable platform. It aims to "build on the experience" of the broadcasters' existing media players, ITV.com, 4oD and the BBC iPlayer.

The BBC Worldwide’s involvement in SeeSaw has yet to be approved by the BBC Trust. Also no consensus on the commercial model has yet been agreed for 3 reasons, ITV wants a free-to-view proposition, some of Channel 4’s US content must be pay-per-view and the BBC is concerned with linking ads to its content. These issues are meaning the launch, which originally was pencilled in for late summer, may be delayed until next year.

From an industry point of view, one of the benefits of such a service is advertisers could potentially access BBC programming. The service could also grow the use of VoD, by having a central source for content and therefore encourage consumers to browse more of the available content. The amazing success of BBC iPlayer & 4OD is already evident with almost half of Virgin Media TV’s customers accessing its VoD service on a monthly basis. Also there are currently 4.25m plays per week on the BBC iPlayer, 2m views per week on ITV.com and 1m views per week on C4 on-demand service. SeeSaw will provide another way for TV contractors to role with the times and access a new breed of audience.

This is one of the best things I have ever seen...a good enough reason to put it on this Blog.
Imagine the effort this took. Not sure if it could happen in London, but in Buenes Aires it's all good.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

An entertaining review of GTA IV by the chap behind Zero Punctuation. It makes some great points about the gameplay and has a little dig at the PS3 version...check it out

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/4902-Zero-Punctuation-Grand-Theft-Auto-IV

Google breaks the ice with Friend Connect

Google has waded into the social networking arena with software designed to break down barriers between existing networks and link small websites into an overarching web of friends.

Google Friend Connect provides participating sites with plug-in applications to enable the exchange of messages, photographs, music, video and games. It will also allow anyone users to import their photos and friends list from Facebook, LinkedIn and a range of smaller social networks.

The software is based on the Google-led Open Social platform, which means that independent software developers will be able to write new programs to extend the scope of the system. It will be available to websites at no cost.

Last week both Facebook and MySpace said they would allow members of their networks to export information and applications from their profile to other websites.
Their announcements illustrate the attempts of the dominant social networks to extend their powerful web presence into new, more profitable areas.

Friend Connect is currently in a limited trial phase and will be available more widely in the next few months.

Brilliant Levi's viral

This Video has clocked up over 2 and a half million views in a week.

There is no real overt branding which makes it even more brilliant. It shows a group of people doing stupid things but the best bit is that you can see yourself doing the same thing (well i can anyway!)

What do you think?

Path

What is Twitter?

Twitter has been around for a while now, but is starting to gain a bit of popularity/usage.

I was planning on writing an explanation myself but i found the below article on the BBC website.

Path.

With so much information to go around, it seems that our appetite is changing: we want our information to be instant, we want it frequent and we want to be easy to consume quickly before we move on to the next thing. It doesn’t even have to be particularly well-formed.From SMS news alerts to simple communications from friends burning off their free credits, especially in the UK, we’re accustomed to receiving nuggets of information via text message. Combine this principle with the RSS feeds introduced by blogging and you get Twitter, the current web service du jour to come bounding out of San Francisco. You can use Twitter to send 140-character text messages via the website, instant message or on your phone, to anyone who has chosen to “follow” you. They will then receive those messages via the medium(s) of their choice.

The implications of this idea are still being explored: depending on who you talk to, it could be really useful (in the right hands) or maybe even psychologically harmful (for the wrong minds).Either way, it’s already very popular, and probably indicative of things to come. Tumblr, the self-styled “scrapbook” publishing tool, is likely to have taken its minimalist inspiration from services like Twitter and del.icio.us, encouraging users to provide a constant feed of info-nuggets without editorialising them too much.

One benefit of stripped-down information in this way is how it can quickly become more useful in conjunction with other types of data. Twitter itself doesn’t do much in this respect, but lots of people are mashing it up – see who’s most “popular” on Twitterholic, for example, or see where in the world people are Twittering from at Twittervision.

Twitter itself perhaps took inspiration from the slightly less snappily-named Jaiku, which not only updates with communications from its users but sucks in feeds from other places – and automatically combines this with location and “availability” data. They’re calling this “presence”, and soon we’ll all know exactly what everyone we know is doing and where they’re doing it. 24-7.

This presents a quandary: should we find less interesting friends so that we don’t feel we’re missing out, or should we encourage our friends to be more interesting so that we have something better to read?

Flogos

We've all heard of high-level advertising but now Flogos has created flying logos. The cloud-like logos are the idea of Francisco Guerra of SnowMasters, a special effects company that specializes in creating snow and foam.

Made of helium and soap (the company promises they are environmentally friendly), a Flogo generator (think big, complicated bubble machine) pushes the bubbly creation through a stencil that gives it the desired look. Flogos can be molded into any form and you can see some examples on the company's website.

Floating logos range in size from 24-48 inches and can last up to an hour, travel 20-30 miles, and reach 20,000 feet all depending on weather conditions. As for now, Flogos only come in plain, old, regular cloud white but the company plans to introduce a colorful options in 2009. But companies are already signing up for some high flying Flogos.

Rythm really IS the Dancer...

I love this. A great ad playing on two different strands of nostalgia (one for Thunderbirds the other for cheesy early 90's dance music...) and fusing them together brilliantly!

What dance music would you like to see classic kids TV show characters dance too...?

Quickie Post It Notes

Convergence within technology has been a hot topic for number of years now. Back in the dark ages the thought of being able to watch TV on your walkman or surf the interent on your mobile seemed a tad ridiculous. Obviously we can do all of these things and more now.

Great - but let's throw this into the mix...how ridiculous does it sound that in the future we may be able to scribble a post it note to someone and the message you write appears on their desktops, mobile phones or PDA's???!!! It sounds pretty far fetched huh? Well check this out...



Designed by a PHD student in India, the project explores how the use of RFID, Artificial Intelligence and ink recognition technologies can make it possible to create intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located, can send reminders and messages, and more broadly, can help us to seamlessly connect our physical and digital worlds.

How it could realistically fit into our professional lives remains to be seen, exciting though isn't it?